this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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Honestly, the biggest selling point for me, and pretty much the entire reason I do have premium, is that they pay the creators you watch way more than a regular view. I guess the alternative would be to sign up to their patreons for a dollar.
Funny you mention that. It occurred to me that the handful of things that would really make me sad to lose if I just bailed on YouTube were all things I could indeed support on Patreon. So now I'm doing that haha. I don't think my current Patreon load costs me anything more than I used to pay for Premium.
According to this page:
TLDR: YouTube premium pays out to each content creator about A$0.23 per month. Regular ad watching gives A$0.09 per month.
Tap for math
Current price of premium is A$16.99 a month in Australia. 30% of $16.99 totals $5.10 monthly pool distributed across every content creator you watch. 70% or $11.90 of your monthly fee goes straight to YouTube and royalties to maintain their music platform you may or may not use.
The math gets really speculative here, but let's say you watch 20 different content creators, half of them make long form videos like Reject Convenience, half of them make shorts. You watch an even mix of 10 minute videos and shorts. Each long form content creator will receive ($5.10 • 0.55) / 10 = $0.28. Each shorts creator will receive ($5.10 • 0.45) / 10 = $0.23. Per month. It's a pittance really.
In comparison, an ad view gives about $0.03 per view, which if you watched 3 videos from each creator, would total $0.09. So premium gives more, but it's like 14¢ per month more per person.
I can't be bothered converting all these numbers to USD, sorry. You can roughly calculate it for your own situation using this formula:
C = (P • 0.3 • F) / NWhere
It's math like this that convinces me that you can contribute more to the ecosystem by paying even a single dollar to a creator's Patreon (even when Patreon takes 30% off the top) and watching w/ adblock than paying a monthly subscription to YT.
I think you're right. Even with the same math (20 subscriptions), you're paying only $3 more per month as a consumer. Meanwhile, each actual creator gets significantly more income per month, even after the Patreon cut: $0.70, or 304% more. Also they're not forced to create 3 videos per month just to eat
Honestly, after sitting down and doing the math, I'm a bit disheartened. I thought I was supporting my favourite creators more with YouTube premium, but 70% goes towards subsidising the music app I don't even use, which is insane to me. Really it should be called "YouTube music (plus ad free)" or something
thats why most of them supplement thier income with brand deals, promotions, , collabs,,,etc and patreon.